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She got off the bed, put the battle plan back in her bag, and stepped outside.
She listened at Werner's door. She could hear it even more clearly. She was too softhearted to ignore it. She opened the door and went in.
Werner was sitting on the edge of the bed, head in hands. When he heard the door he looked up, startled. His face was red with emotion and wet with tears. His tie was pulled down and his collar undone. He looked at Carla with misery in his eyes. He was bowled over, devastated, and too wretched to care who knew it.
Carla could not pretend to be heartless. "What is it?" she said.
"I can't do this anymore," he said.
She closed the door behind her. "What happened?"
"They cut off Lili Markgraf's head--and I had to watch."
Carla stared openmouthed. "What on earth are you talking about?"
"She was twenty-two." He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. "You're already in danger, but if I tell you this it will be a lot worse."
Her mind was full of amazing surmises. "I think I can guess, but tell me," she said.
He nodded. "You'll figure it out soon, anyway. Lili helped Heinrich broadcast to Moscow. It's much quicker if someone reads you the code groups. And the faster you go, the less likely you are to be caught. But Lili's cousin stayed at the apartment for a few days and found her codebooks. Nazi bitch."
His words confirmed her astonishing suspicions. "You know about the spying?"
He looked at her with an ironic smile. "I'm in charge of it."
"Good God!"
"That's why I had to drop the whole business of the murdered children. Moscow ordered me to. And they were right. If I'd lost my job at the Air Ministry I would have had no access to secret papers, nor to other people who could bring me secrets."
She needed to sit down. She perched on the edge of the bed beside him. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"We work on the assumption that everyone talks under torture. Knowing nothing, you can't betray others. Poor Lili was tortured, but she only knew Volodya, who's back in Moscow now, and Heinrich, and she never knew Heinrich's second name or anything else about him."
Carla was chilled to the bone. Everyone talks under torture.
Werner finished: "I'm sorry I've told you, but after seeing me like this you were on the point of guessing it all anyway."
"So I've completely misjudged you."
"Not your fault. I deliberately misled you."
"I feel a fool just the same. I've despised you for two years."
"All the while I was desperate to explain to you."
She put her arm around him.
He took her other hand and kissed it. "Can you forgive me?"
She was not sure how she felt, but she did not want to reject him when he was so down, so she said: "Yes, of course."
"Poor Lili," he said. His voice fell to a whisper. "She had been so badly beaten, she could hardly walk to the guillotine. Yet she begged for life, right up to the end."
"How come you were there?"
"I've befriended a Gestapo man, Inspector Thomas Macke. He took me."
"Macke? I remember him--he arrested my father." She vividly recalled a round-faced man with a small black mustache, and she experienced again her rage at the arrogant power Macke had to take her father away, and her grief when he died of the injuries he suffered at Macke's hands.
